


going down fighting

by harperuth



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Chick Please!, F/F, Genderqueer Character, Genderswap, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-20
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-09-01 00:51:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8600677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harperuth/pseuds/harperuth
Summary: But now she wants to photograph Bittle, she wants to take a time lapse of her healing, grinning around a lip that keeps re-splitting without so much a wince from Erin.
(aka the fic where Erin Bittle gets into a fight and Jaq Zimmerman can't fight these feelings any longer.)





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stiction](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stiction/gifts).



> part of stiction and i's sprawling chick please! au. sorry this took over a year to finish babe, i'm not a writer like you are.

For the first time since she was maybe eight or nine and still wobbly on skates Jaq finds herself frozen on the ice. The only thing that spurs her into movement is muscle memory. She grabs the back of Shitty’s jersey as they skate by.

“Come on Jaq, lemme at ‘em,” Shits is practically frothing, but not fighting her grip, “We’re honor bound to help Bits!!”

Jaq says nothing just watches as Bittle grins, feral and bloody as she circles the Boston Uni A, before the other girl takes a swipe and connects, Bittle still fighting as they hit the ice and the refs break it up.

=

Jaq didn’t get on particularly well with Bittle at first. She’d seen that small, blonde girl and her heart rabbited. She was torn between the battle of _girls that look like you are the reason men think we can only figure skate_ and _sour sweet vodka on someone else’s tongue, fingers buried in shorter blonde hair, her own torturous voice saying, “Shit Parser, yeah.”_

So she maybe hadn’t been particularly nice. And that had gone on uncontested for only a couple weeks when Johnson had sat with her on the roof, politely downwind and holding a joint. Jaq…liked Johnson? Sure she could be a little weird, but she was respectful and an excellent neighbor.

Johnson had been quietly smoking for a bit, when she turned to Jaq, “You shouldn’t downplay the importance of original characters when forging a past despite a limited canon characterization.”

“I’ll…take that into consideration?” Jaq had finally conceded.

“Good,” Johnson had finished her joint and climbed back in the window, “You really need to establish a better baseline with Bitty if this narrative is going to make any sense.”

=

Any sense of misplaced hatred isn’t the issue anymore. Jaq can’t stop staring at Bittle.

Bittle’s spoils of war, as Shitty has started calling them, have manifested as a split lip and a shadow of a black eye that trails its way up into her eyebrow and down along her cheekbone. Both of them shift whenever Bittle smiles, and Jaq finds herself watching near constantly for Bittle’s smile.

=

Jaq knows she fixates easily. Well. Not easily maybe, but often. Before, and everything is Before and After in a way her therapist has discouraged but she can’t stop, Before she fixated on the world stopping kind of things. She’d get caught up in these feedback loops of sensation and panic. Jaq had her own stats page constantly open on her computer and then her phone for roughly three years. She kept the last gift Kendra had given her for longer.

But this is such a small thing, Bittle’s split lip. Jaq is just self-aware enough at this point to feel herself latching, but she’s not sure she wants to stop it. That’s the thought that sends her spiraling into Shitty’s room at four am, when she’s just woken from a fitful sleep and they’ve not been to bed yet.

“JACQUELINE,” Shits is banging away at their thesis and incandescent with it, and Jaq chooses the noble path and doesn’t mention their state of undress, “What brings you to my humble abode this evening? Aren’t I the one who usually invades your space, as you’ve so often called _me being your friend_? Is it opposite day?”

“I fucked up,” Jaq moans, face down on their bed, “Shits, I have _feelings_.”

“It was bound to happen sometime,” Shitty muses, “You can’t subsist on hockey, history, and denial over how many covers of _Let It Go_ you have on your phone forever.”

“Christ, will you ever let that go?”

“Jaq. Jaq Jaq Jaq,” Shitty has their admonishing mom voice on and oh my god Jaq hates it, “You cried in a theater full of nine-year olds over a subpar Disney princess that had ice-powers. Not only will I not _let it go_ , I’m caring for it as my own spawn, building it a shrine, and giving you a lifetime membership to the museum exhibit.”

“That didn’t make sense,” Jaq sighs and glares up at them, “and I hate you.”

“Au contraire my large Canadian princess,” Shitty says, “You couldn’t live without me. And fuck you I always make sense, that’s exactly what I meant.”

“Your French is honestly the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Don’t distract me from the point with your general woe over Elsa, Jacqueline Zimmerman,” Shitty finally drops their laptop to the side and climbs all over Jaq, “I heard the word _feelings_ , and their general relation to you, and it must be super serious if you’re actually admitting it.”

Jaq revels in the comfort of Shitty never recognizing her personal space and curls up into the touch. She decides in that moment to forget how little they’re wearing.

=

Jaq played with this girl in her 14U league one summer, Melanie, no…Miser and never Mels. Miser was tiny, even at 13, but she was one of the best wingers that Jaq has ever played with. She had the quickest hands and even quicker feet, found holes that even Jaq couldn’t see and read d-men like no one else.

For a few months it was the Miser-Zimms-Parser line that was breaking records and making local headlines, even ghosting into bigger publications. They’d been together constantly on and off the ice, unbreakable in the way that friendships that age always were, and then suddenly Miser was gone. Jaq remembers catching her at the rink once, covered in a scrap of spandex and sequins and unlacing new figure skates.

This was before she had learned to keep her mouth shut about shit that wasn’t really her business, so she found herself saying desperately, “Miser, what _happened?_ ”

Miser had always been more plain-spoken and in your face than even Kendra, she’d shrugged, “Dad pulled me, said there’s no future for a girl in the game…and I mean, I need to skate. You understand that right?”

Jaq had felt helpless in that moment, pinned down and under a microscope in a way that had never sunk in before. Abstractly she’d known that she wasn’t going to be like her dad, wasn’t going to do anything more than sit in that cup as a baby, wasn’t going to carry on the line of Bad Bob storming hockey in the NHL.

Jaq knew just as well she can’t be figure skater. Miser was small and fast and beautiful in a deadly sense, but Jaq knew she was Big. Only getting bigger, her dad liked to joke, while Jaq pretended this was a good thing. Jaq was intimidating in her pads but out of them she was just awkward for a girl.

But sitting in those stands with Miser it all hit her for the first time. Jaq must have looked like some kind of ghost, because Miser tossed her skates into her bag and hugged her for a while.

“I mean, it’s not like I can’t build from this,” Miser had eventually pulled away and shrugged, “I’m trying to talk my coach into letting me do pairs. Much more competitive. Much less competitive, y’know?”

Jaq had smiled at her, “You were always the best at reading someone else on the ice.”

“Yeah,” Miser gathered her stuff and started to leave, “Yeah I was.”

They were still friends on Facebook. Last she’d seen Miser had gotten her PR degree and was doing work for the IOC. Jaq was happy for her, but occasionally poked at the idea of what her life would’ve ended up like if she’d had to quit hockey then too. It was a useless thought exercise but it was fun. She liked to imagine her dog and her archivist work and, on days when she was feeling particularly daring, her girlfriend.

=

Jaq loses time in class, not that she phases out exactly, more that she doesn’t realize she’s been thinking about Bittle for a solid forty-five minutes until everyone else in the hall is packing up and all she’s written in her notes is the date and a vague note about aperture. _Jesus_.

Jaq has discovered that taking a picture of something she doesn’t necessarily understand can shift the entire thing into focus. This first time she took a picture of Shitty and Lardo on the roof of the Haus, jousting in a snowstorm (with that…that _fucking_ garden gnome from hell), she looked at the proof and found herself thinking _home_. As opposed to, y’know, these idiots are going to kill me when they get themselves killed one day.

But now she wants to _photograph Bittle_ , she wants to take a time lapse of her healing, grinning around a lip that keeps re-splitting without so much a wince from Erin. She wants to see the natural contour of the bruise edging her cheekbone as it recedes. Jaq wants to take them and keep them, maybe understand that she can throw herself over and over at Erin…that Erin will just smile, re-split her lip and _catch her_.

=

Bittle was like a grown up Miser but with more rage.

They were both small, sharp and deadly on the ice, friendlier and more open off. But, where Miser could be counted on to be loud and in your face, Bittle would stay quiet, murder on her face.

Jaq asked Shitty about that once and Shitty had just hugged her round the head, thank god they’d been having a ‘he’ day and were wearing a binder, and patted at her ear. Shitty was weird sometimes, but they’d been serious when they’d explained.

“Listen, I never really learned to be a Quiet Small Person,” They said, “I had enough mouth on me that I never really got fucked with, even when I was the Tiny Loud Trans. Also, from the northeast. But Bitty is smaller than me somehow, and she’s from a place where being the Tiny Loud Dyke? Not a good thing to be. Small means you get targeted, and being a queer girl in the Deep South? I shudder to think Jaq, positively shudder, My Lord, I do declare, do you feel this I am straight up shuddering.”

The whole thing had ended in a wrestling match that broke up when Ransom and Holster entered the fray with their _harmonized battle cry what the fuck_ , and put down the insurrection, maintaining their title as Non-Exploitative Champion Tag Team Wrestling Duo of Samwell Women’s Hockey.

=

It’s one of those nights that Jaq feels like she’s going crawl out of her skin, the kind of night that used to end with her crawling into bed with Kendra, grind against her in an attempt to ground herself. She wanders down to the Haus kitchen, less out of desire for anything, more out of need to move. She’s idly considering a late-night run when she realizes the kitchen isn’t empty.

Erin looks as startled as she is and just as tired. Jaq thinks she waves. Bittle quirks her mouth into a grin, “Evenin’ there.”

The grin pulls at the scab on her mouth and Jaq loses a moment. She knows—hockey from the moment she could skate—how different skin that’s healing feels and she wonders how kissing Erin would feel. If the parts of her closer to the lingering scab would run hotter under Jaq’s lips. She rushes back to herself all at once, fingers tingling with imagined and remembered blonde hair through them.

“Rough night?” Erin quips. Jaq can’t help the chuckle that escapes her.

“Yeah. Yeah, you?”

Erin’s eyes skitter over the table in front of her before she squares herself, “Coach called earlier…so, yeah.”

Jaq’s never gotten into a fight on the ice. She knows in women’s hockey what a big deal it is that Bittle has. Despite that, in this moment Jaq knows that Bittle is braver than she’ll ever be. She does the only thing she can and opens.

“Cravings,” She says, doesn’t look away when Erin meets her eye, “Doesn’t really ever go away, but some nights are harder.”

Erin’s silent, still for a moment then she grins, “Wanna break into Faber and beat our respective demons into the goal?”

Jaq unwinds, feels like a person for the first time that night. Grins back, “Yeah.”

**Author's Note:**

> an entire relationship was formed the moment stiction dmed me and said "except.... what if.... everyone was girls........" and this is the little i could return. 
> 
> hmu at tumblr: jizzdrifting.tumblr.com
> 
> find the million and one mixes for this au here: http://8tracks.com/harperuth/collections/chick-please


End file.
